by Jonathan Coe
‘No, I believe you,’ she said. ‘I was just trying to remember something.’ She sat back and gazed at the window, now dotted with spluttering rain. ‘Some time last year, I had to do an abstract of a piece in one of the newspapers. It was about that crash – somebody’s theory about what might have happened, based on new information. You know, post-glasnost, and all that.’
‘What did it say?’
‘I’ve forgotten a lot of it; but the whole thing was pretty indecisive, anyway, I think. Something about another plane, a much larger one, crossing his flight path and creating a lot of turbulence just as he was coming out of the cloud. Throwing him off course.’
I shook my head. ‘My theory’s better than that. Well, it’s the same theory that a lot of people have, actually. The idea is that the Soviet authorities bumped him off, because he’d seen a bit too much of the West and he liked it and he was probably going to defect.’
Fiona smiled: an affectionate but challenging smile.
‘You think you can reduce everything to politics, don’t you, Michael? It makes life so simple for you.’
‘I don’t see what’s simple about it.’
‘Well of course politics can be complicated, I realize that. But I always think there’s something treacherous about that sort of approach. The way it tempts us to believe there’s an explanation for everything, somewhere or other, if only we’re prepared to look hard enough. That’s what you’re really interested in, isn’t it? Explaining things away.’
‘What’s the alternative?’
‘No, that’s not the point. I’m just saying there are other possibilities to be taken into account. Larger ones, even.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as … well, supposing he really did die by accident? Suppose it was circumstance that killed him: nothing more, nothing less. Wouldn’t that be more frightening to face up to than your little conspiracy theory? Or supposing it was suicide. He’d seen things that nobody else had seen, after all – incredibly beautiful things, by the sound of it. Perhaps he never really came back to reality, and this was the culmination of something irrational, some madness which had been burning away inside him – well out of the reach of you and your politics. I don’t suppose you’d like the sound of that much, either.’
‘Well, if you’re determined to get sentimental about it …’
Fiona shrugged. ‘Maybe I am sentimental. But there are dangers in being too dogmatic, you know. Seeing everything in black and white.’ I couldn’t think of an answer to this, and concentrated instead on impaling a trio of spongy peas on the end of my fork. Her next question took me by surprise. ‘When are you going to tell me why you fell out with your mother in that Chinese restaurant?’
I looked up and said: ‘That’s a rather abrupt change of subject.’
‘It’s not a change of subject at all.’
‘I’m not with you,’ I muttered, returning to my food.
‘You’ve been promising to tell me for months. You even want to tell me: it’s obvious.’ Since no response was forthcoming, she continued to think aloud. ‘What could she have said, to hurt you so badly? So badly that it split you in two. The half that refuses to forgive her because it insists on seeing things in black and white, and the other half – the one you’ve been trying to smother ever since it happened.’ I said nothing; just pushed a piece of turkey around my plate, soaking it in thick, oily gravy. ‘Do you even know where she is this afternoon? What she’ll be doing?’
‘She’ll be sitting at home, I expect.’
‘By herself?’
‘Probably.’ I gave up and pushed the plate aside. ‘Look, there can’t be any going back. It was my father who held us together, anyway. Once he died, then … that was that.’
‘But you still saw each other after he died. That’s not why it happened.’
I did want to tell her, that’s the strange thing. I desperately wanted to tell her. But it was going to have to be torn out of me, one piece at a time, and the process was only just beginning. I didn’t mean to be unhelpful: I didn’t mean to sound wilfully enigmatic. That was just how it came out.
I said: ‘People can die more than once.’
Fiona stared at me. She said: ‘Why don’t we just skip the pudding and leave?’
∗
It was an argument, of sorts, even if neither of us could be quite sure how it had happened. We left the pub in silence and spoke only a few words on the way back to the car. Driving home, not wanting to waste the last half hour of daylight, I suggested a quick walk on the South Downs. We walked arm in arm, having silently buried our differences, whatever they were, through a landscape which might have been attractive on a sunny day but now, what with the cold and the encroaching dusk, felt bare and forbidding. Fiona seemed very tired.
I was amazed, in fact, that she’d managed to last this long, and it was no surprise to see her nodding off as we resumed our journey. I looked at her reposeful face and was reminded of the intimacy I’d felt, the sense of privilege, the night that I’d sneaked up to Joan’s room and watched her for a few minutes as she slept. But this was deceptive, because looking at Fiona was not like looking into the past: quite the opposite. For with every snatched glance (I was trying to keep my eyes on the road) I felt that I was being offered a glimpse of something new and unthinkable, something that I had been needlessly denying myself, now, for many years: a future.
We stopped off only once more, at a service station where I went to buy myself some Smarties and a Yorkie bar. By the time I got back to the car she was fast asleep.
∗
And yet, only six days later –
Can this be true?
And yet, only six days later
∗
I’m not sure I can go through with this.
4
The day after Boxing Day, my Christmas parcel of books arrived from the Peacock Press. There was a note from Mrs Tonks, apologizing for having sent them later than usual. I couldn’t motivate myself to look at them or even take the wrapping off. In the afternoon I went over to Findlay’s flat to see the papers he had stolen. They didn’t really tell me anything new. Instead of feeling intrigued, or baffled, or worried by Tabitha’s letter and the concrete evidence it provided that she had once written to the publishers and implored them to procure my services when I didn’t even know of her existence, I was able to register barely a flicker of interest. The Winshaws and their ruthless, fantastic, power-hungry lives had never seemed so distant. As for the envelope which presumably contained the incriminating photographs of Alice, I didn’t even open it.
Fiona was everything now.
The next day she had her rescheduled appointment at the clinic, and this time I was determined to accompany her. For some reason, she’d been feeling quite a lot worse since her day out by the seaside. I thought it would have done her some good. But her cough had returned, more insistent than before, and she complained of feeling short of breath: climbing the stairs to her flat the previous evening, she had had to rest on three of the four landings.
The appointment was at eleven-thirty. We waited ages for a bus and were a few minutes late arriving at the hospital, a black-bricked Victorian monstrosity more conducive, I would have thought, to the punishment of long-term offenders than the treatment of the sick. It didn’t matter, anyway: it was well past twelve when Fiona got called into the consulting room. I waited outside, struggling to sustain a vestige of optimism in the face of these relentlessly dispiriting surroundings: the queasy, pale yellow décor, the malfunctioning coffee machine, which had already robbed us of 6op, the erratic heating system (one enormous cast iron radiator was on full-blast, the other not at all; and every so often the pipes would gurgle and splutter and shake visibly against the walls, dislodging crumbs of plaster). I could only stand it for about five minutes, and was about to go out for a walk when Fiona returned, looking flushed and agitated.
‘Out already?’ I said. ‘That was quick.’
; ‘They can’t find my notes,’ she said, walking straight past me and heading for the exit.
I hurried after her.
‘What?’
We were outside again. It was bitterly cold.
‘What do you mean, exactly?’
‘I mean that they can’t find the notes to my case. They looked for them this morning and they weren’t there. Some secretary’s probably got them. Lost in the system, basically. They blamed it on the holiday.’
‘So where does that leave you?’
‘I’ve got another appointment for next week.’
Tides of righteous frustration welled up inside me.
‘Fiona, they can’t keep doing this to you. You’re ill, for God’s sake. You can’t let your health be tampered with by a bunch of idiots. We’re not going to stand for it.’
This was just empty bravado, and we both knew it.
‘Shut up, Michael.’ She coughed furiously for about thirty seconds, doubled up against the hospital wall, and then straightened herself. ‘Come on. We’re going home.’
∗
It was New Year’s Eve.
The original plan had been to go back to the Mandarin. I’d phoned them at lunchtime and with a little persuasion had managed to secure a table for two; but by early in the evening it was obvious that Fiona wasn’t well enough to go out, so I promised to cook her dinner instead. There was a large continental grocer’s open on the King’s Road: I bought some fish and cheese and pasta and tinned prawns, in the hope of improvising a seafood lasagne. I got some wine and some candles. I was determined to make an occasion of it. I looked in on Fiona at about seven o’clock and she was sitting up in bed, a bit pale and breathless. Her temperature was high. She wasn’t very hungry, but she liked the sound of this meal. The idea seemed to amuse her.
‘Do you want me to get dressed up?’ she said.
‘Of course. I may even get out my old dinner suit, if I can find it.’
She smiled. ‘I can hardly wait.’
‘I’ll come and get you at nine. How does that sound?’
The dinner suit had a stale and musty smell, and the collar on my dress shirt was much too tight, but I put them on anyway. At nine o’clock the lasagne was bubbling away quite satisfactorily, the table was laid, the wine was nicely chilled. I let myself into Fiona’s flat. She wasn’t in the sitting room and there was no answer when I called out her name. A sudden premonition drew me into the bedroom.
Fiona was kneeling on the floor in front of the open wardrobe. She was wearing a long blue cotton dress which was not yet zipped up at the back. She was rocking slowly backwards and forwards and struggling for breath. I knelt down beside her and asked what was wrong. She said that she’d felt more and more exhausted as she was trying to get dressed, and then she’d been looking for a pair of tights in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe when she found that she couldn’t get her breath. I put my hand to her forehead, which was very hot, and beaded with sweat. Could she breathe now, I asked. She said yes, but she didn’t think she could get up just yet. I said that I was going to phone for the doctor. She nodded. I asked her where the number was. Between short, high breaths, she managed to say: ‘Phone.’
There was an address book by the telephone in the hallway. It took me a minute or two to remember the doctor’s name.
‘Dr Campion?’ I said, when the call was answered, and then realized that I was talking to a machine. There was a recorded message which told me to try another number. This time I got put through to an answering service. The man at the other end of the line asked me which doctor I was trying to contact, and whether it was an emergency. When I’d given him the details he told me that the deputizing doctor would call back as soon as possible.
The phone rang after about three or four minutes. I started to tell the doctor what was wrong. I wanted to be as quick and as clear as possible, so I could get back to Fiona, but it wasn’t that easy. Because he’d never heard of her before, never examined her, never seen any notes, never been told about the case, I had to explain everything from the beginning. Then he asked me if I thought it was serious. I told him I thought it was very serious, but I could tell that he didn’t really believe me. He thought I was talking about someone with a bad cold. I wasn’t going to be put off. I told him he had to come out and see her. He said that he had two other patients to see first – urgent cases, was how he described them – but that he’d come out as soon as he could.
I helped Fiona back into bed. Her breathing was marginally better by now. I went back to my flat and turned off the oven and blew out the candles. Then I changed out of my dinner suit and came back to sit with her.
She looked so beautiful, so
∗
The doctor arrived at about ten-fifteen. I tried to be angry with him for taking such a long time but he made this difficult by being so kind and efficient. He didn’t do much, just listened to her chest and took her pulse and asked me a few questions. He could see that she was ill.
He said: ‘I think she’d better go into casualty.’
This was the last thing I’d been expecting.
‘Casualty? But I thought that was for accidents.’
‘It’s for emergency cases,’ he said. He tore a page out of his notebook, scribbled four words on it, and then sealed it in an envelope from his briefcase. His own breathing while he did this seemed wheezy and over-emphatic. ‘Take this letter with you. It’s for the casualty doctor. Do you have a car?’
I shook my head.
‘You’d probably have a long wait for a taxi tonight. I’d better drive you both in. It’s on my way home.’
We prepared Fiona for the journey by helping her to put on two thick jumpers over her dress, and some thick woollen socks and a pair of boots. By the time we’d finished with her, she looked slightly ridiculous. I half-carried, half-walked her down the stairs and within a few minutes we were in the doctor’s shiny blue Renault. I was trying to stay calm but found that without realizing it I had screwed his envelope up into a tight ball in the palm of my hand. I did my best to smooth it out as we arrived.
∗
The casualty unit, while not quite as run-down as the outpatients’ clinic, none the less managed to feel both crowded and desolate. Business was brisk. There was frost on the pavements and several people had showed up with minor injuries from slips and falls; and because it was New Year’s Eve, there were already one or two victims of pub fights nursing swollen eyes and head wounds. They were expecting more of those later. At the same time there was an atmosphere of rather desperate levity and celebration in the air. Threadbare decorations adorned the walls and I got the impression that there was some sort of low-key staff party going on in a distant room. Some of the nurses running backwards and forwards were wearing silly brightly coloured hats, and the woman at reception had a radio on her desk, tuned to Radio 2 I gave her the doctor’s note and pointed to Fiona sitting over on a bench, but she didn’t seem to think it was any big deal. That was when I realized that the doctor hadn’t actually been as efficient as I’d thought, because he’d forgotten to phone up and let them know that we were coming in. She told us to wait and that a nurse would be along soon to take down all the details. We waited twenty minutes and there was no nurse. Fiona was shivering in my arms. Neither of us said anything. Then I went over to the desk again and asked what was going on. She apologized and told us we wouldn’t have to wait much longer.
Ten minutes later a nurse turned up and started asking questions. I answered most of them: Fiona wasn’t up to it. The nurse marked the answers off on a clipboard. Quite soon she seemed to reach a decision and said, ‘Follow me, please.’ As she led us off down a corridor I ventured a meek complaint: ‘There don’t seem to be many doctors about.’
It was already after eleven o’clock.
‘There’s only one casualty officer tonight. He’s seeing the majors and the minors, so he’s got a lot on his plate. There was one very sick patient in earlier. Rotten luck, isn’t it
, on New Year’s Eve?’
I didn’t know whether she meant it was rotten luck for the patient or for the medical staff, so I didn’t answer.
She took us into a tiny windowless cubicle, equipped with a trolley and not much else, and fetched Fiona a gown.
‘There you are, dear. Can you put that on?’
‘Perhaps I’d better step outside,’ I said.
‘It’s all right, he can stay,’ said Fiona, to the nurse.
I turned to the wall and didn’t look while she took off her clothes and put the gown on. I’d never seen her naked.
The nurse took her temperature and her pulse and blood pressure. Then she disappeared. About a quarter of an hour later we were seen by the casualty officer, a harassed-looking man who went through only the most cursory introductions before putting his stethoscope to Fiona’s chest.
‘Nothing very startling there,’ he said. After that he took her pulse, and glanced at some figures from the chart which had been left by the bedside. ‘Hmm. Bit of a chest infection, by the looks of things. You may have to come in for a few days. I’ll get on to the admitting team, and in the meantime we’ll see if we can get you X-rayed tonight: assuming there isn’t too much of a queue.’
‘She’s been X-rayed already,’ I said. He looked at me questioningly. ‘I don’t mean today. I mean a few weeks ago. Her GP – Dr Campion – sent her up here and they took X-rays then.’
‘Who was the consultant?’
I couldn’t remember.
‘Dr Searle,’ said Fiona.
‘What did they show?’
‘We don’t know. The first time she came for the results he didn’t turn up, and the next time – a couple of days ago – they couldn’t find the notes. Said they were lost in the system.’
‘Well, they’re probably back in medical records by now. We can’t get at them tonight.’ He put the chart back on the bed. ‘I’ll bleep the registrar right away, and she can get hold of Dr Bishop for you. Our houseman,’ he explained to Fiona. ‘He’ll be down to see you in a few minutes.’
